ute principle of all activity, the matrix, the infinite source
whence all things proceed, whither all things return, and in which they
are eternally preserved.

Thus the universal is never separated from this ethereal element, from
this Unity with itself, this concentration within itself.

_IV.--WHAT IS EVIL?_

As the universal, God could not find Himself faced by a contrary whereof
the reality should pretend to rise above the phantasmal level. For this
pure unity and this perfect transparency matter is nothing impenetrable,
and spirit, the ego, is not so independent as to possess a true,
individual, substantiality of its own.

There has been a tendency to label this idea pantheism. It would be more
exact to call it the conception of substantiality. God is first
determined as substance only. The absolute subject spirit is also
substance; but it is determined rather as subject. This is the
difference generally ignored by those who assert that speculative
philosophy is pantheism. As usual, they miss the essential point and
disparage philosophy by falsifying it.

Pantheism is commonly taken to mean that God is all things--the whole,
the universe, the collection of all existences, of things infinite and
infinitely diverse. From which notion the charge is brought against
philosophy that it teaches that all things are God; that is to say, that
God is, not the universal which is in and for itself, but the infinite
multiplicity of individual things in their empirical and immediate
existence.

If you say God is all that is here, this paper, etc., you have indeed
committed yourself to the pantheism with which philosophy is reproached;
that is, the whole is understood as equivalent to all individual things.
But there is also the genus, which is equally the universal, yet is
wholly different from this totality in which the universal is but the
collection of individual things, and the basis, the content, is
constituted by these things themselves. To say that there has ever been
a religion which has taught this pantheism is to say what is absolutely
untrue. It has never entered any man's mind that everything is God; that
is to say, that God is things in their individual and contingent
existence. Far less has philosophy ever taught this doctrine.

Spinozism itself, as such, as well as Oriental pantheism, contains this
doctrine: that the divine in all things is no more than that which is
universal in their content, their es